Wei Duan introduces herself to a group of Bangladeshi students at Yunnan University

As a postgraduate student at Yunnan University in Southwest China, I have been conducting a longitudinal ethnography with a group of international students from Bangladesh since their arrival at my university in 2018. While receiving Putonghua-mediated courses, many of my participants complain that they do not see their identities as Chinese language learners depicted in their textbooks. Their exposure to Chinese language textbooks does not expand their intercultural communication capacity but reduces them into reproducing stereotypes.

How is that possible? One of the reasons relates to the representation of interlocutors’ cultural elements in Chinese textbooks, as I found in my research.

The selected data for investigation of Chinese language textbooks are the eight textbooks of the Boya series including four levels: Elementary I/II, Quasi-intermediate I/II, Intermediate I/II, and Advanced I/II. The reasons for selecting this series are that Boya textbooks are the main materials for Bangladeshi students learning Chinese at my university. These textbooks have been published by Peking University Press and were approved by China’s national Eleventh Five-year Plan for general higher education.

Despite their thoroughly Chinese identity, an investigation of the linguistic and cultural representations of the imagined Chinese language learners in these textbooks reveals surprisingly Anglo-centric perspectives on human diversity.

International students with innate English proficiency

One of these Anglo-centric assumptions about Chinese language learners is that they naturally have English language proficiency.

Among eight Boya textbooks, there are 69 units in total and each unit consists of a Chinese reading passage with more than 30 lists of words for explanation. Almost all of the Chinese words listed are matched with English definitions. The frequency of using English as equivalent translation for Chinese words and Chinese grammatical knowledge is quite intense for the elementary level I and II. For example, the phonological knowledge of Chinese language is illustrated with English translation: “汉语的音节由三部分组成：声母、韵母和声调。声调不同，意义就可能不一样” (Among the components of a Chinese syllable, there is tone besides the initial and the final. Syllables with same initials and finals but in different tones usually have different meanings) (Elementary I, p. 1).

Examples such as these are obviously informed by the assumption that international students learning Chinese can refer to English as help if they find Chinese words difficult to understand. However, this assumption is questionable and not borne out by the reality that not all international students are proficient in English.

What further problematizes such English translations is their redundancy and low quality. When international students move to intermediate and advanced levels, they are assumed to be able to understand the basic terms but need additional help in culture-loaded words such as “宝剑” and “内涵”. However, these two words have been mistranslated into “double-edged sword” and “intention” respectively on p. 79 from Intermediate II and p. 45 from Advanced I. In reality, “宝剑” is best translated simply as “sword”. It refers to a traditional hand sword used as a weapon. “内涵” is used to describe someone’s quality or cultural knowledge of a certain practice. It has numerous English translations, including “attribute”, “connotation”, and “inner quality”.

English as panacea in China

Apart from the overwhelming coverage of English translation, English is constructed as a panacea in China: English is presented as the key to solving intercultural communication problems, finding a profitable job, and establishing social status. This is illustrated in the following example, a sample dialogue between a Chinese restaurant owner and international students at a Chinese restaurant in China.

有一天，我们四个刚来中国的老外去饭馆吃饭。点菜的时候碰到了麻烦：我们不认识菜单上那些奇奇怪怪的菜的名字。老板想了不少办法，希望我们能明白这些菜是什么。他一边做着奇怪的动作，一边在桌子上画画。他重复了好几遍，可我们还是猜不出他的意思。这时，一个中国姑娘在旁边说话了：“老板，很多老外不吃鸭头，也不吃猪心、猪肚。”她又用英语解释给我们听。听了她的解释，再想想老板的动作，我们都笑了。我们上了来北京后最有用的一堂课，记住了“心”“肝”“肚”“下水”。

One day, we four newcomers went to a Chinese restaurant. We had some trouble ordering dishes because we didn’t know the odd names on the menu. The owner tried several ways to make us understand what dishes they were. He was drawing pictures on the table while doing weird actions. He repeated several times, but we still couldn’t get his meaning. At this moment, a Chinese girl said to the owner, “many foreigners don’t eat duck heads, pig hearts or stomach.” Then she explained to us in English. Hearing her explanation and recalling the funny actions of the owner, we all laughed. This was the most useful lesson we had when we first arrived in Beijing. We remembered the words for “heart”, “liver”, “belly” and “meatloaf” in Chinese. (Quasi-intermediate I, p. 32, my translation)

The above excerpt seems to convey a delightful tone in understanding Chinese culture. However, a close examination of the excerpt indicates the unequal and hierarchical relation. First of all, the Chinese restaurant owner turns out to be incompetent and powerless in front of a group of newly arrived international students in Beijing, the capital city of China. Instead of using Putonghua, the lingua franca in China or turning to any translation apps, it is the Chinese restaurant owner who has to make all the effort to make himself understood by using “weird” and “funny” actions. Second, the newly arrived international students seem to be the norm-givers in judging what to eat, what is “odd” and “weird”, and how others are supposed to behave when any intercultural communication problems arise. The efforts made by the restaurant owner are not appreciated but considered as laughing stock for fun. Thirdly, it is English that comes to the rescue and helps overcome the supposed embarrassment of the Chinese restaurant owner doing business in China.

The effortless experiences that the Chinese language learners represented in the textbooks have in China is often associated with constructing “laowai” (foreigners) as desirable speaker of English in China,

在大城市，能说英语的人太多。在北京，连出租车司机也能说英语。很多时候你刚说出“你好”，好学的中国人就会马上说起英语来。由于你的汉语不如他们的英语流利，所以常常是他们说，你听。

In big cities, many people can speak English. In Beijing, even taxi drivers can speak English. Many times when you begin to say “Hello” in Chinese, studious Chinese will immediately talk with you in English. As your Chinese is not as fluent as their English, it is you who listen and them who speak. (Quasi-intermediate II, p. 32, my translation)

English is also constructed in Chinese language textbooks as desirable capital for getting a profitable job and upgrading social status.

汽车杂志》诚聘记者2名：汽车专业、中文专业或其他相关专业大学本科以上，英语 6级 425分以上或托福 500 分以上。

“Automobile Magazine” is looking for two journalists with majors in Automotive Studies or Chinese or other related subjects with Bachelor degree or above. The applicants should provide their English certificates either with more than 425 scores in CET 6 or more than 500 in TOFEL. (Quasi-intermediate II, p. 62, my translation)

王大伟的简历：在美国上大学，在英国读研究生，在中国学汉语，在美国 IBM 公司做工程师，香港 IBM 公司经理，上海大学教授，北京大学教授。

Wang Dawei’s CV: undergraduate study in the USA, postgraduate in UK, learning Chinese language in China; an engineer in the American IBM company, a manager in Hong Kong IBM company, professor in Shanghai University and Peking University. (Quasi-intermediate I, p. 206, my translation)

The USA as source of reference

When non-Chinese cultures and identities are referenced in the eight Boya Chinese language textbooks, USA-related cultural practices and figures predominate and they always are presented in a positive light. Statements like “美国人……” (American people are …) or “美国……” (the USA is …) are ubiquitous throughout the textbooks. If the topic is about self-introduction, American people are definitely included in the content. If it is about geography, the USA, or US states and cities such as California or New York are chosen as example for comparison. With other social issues like education, festivals, food or the economy, the USA is the ever-present reference point in the textbooks.

The USA not only predominates quantitatively but is also constructed as a desirable way of living. One of the highly valued qualities is that the USA is constructed as the best destination for learning English. “我想学习英语， 我一定要去美国” (I want to learn English. I must go to the USA) (Elementary I, p. 180). Besides, the USA is reproduced as the most developed and most powerful country. For instance, on p. 105 from textbook Advanced II, the USA is described as “世界最发达国家” (the most developed country in the world); on p. 167 from textbook Intermediate I: “在今天的世界舞台上，美国扮演着非常重要的角色” (The United States plays a very important role throughout the world today). Apart from that, American people are represented as successful, innovative and flexible.

比尔盖茨20岁有了自己的公司，开始做微软老板

Bill Gates had his own company at the age of 20 and has became the boss of Microsoft. (Intermediate I, p. 112, my translation)

Other American figures such as Olympic athletes and the founder of Disney are also positively represented in these Chinese language textbooks, to name only a few.

工作时是医院的大夫还是公司老板，一到球场美国人就会完全变成另一个人。他们会身    穿公牛队服，脚上穿着200美元一双的耐克运动鞋，把自己当作一个篮球运动员，完全       和他们本来的身份不同。

They might be hospital doctors or company owners. As long as American people go to a basketball match, they will wear Bull uniform and Nike shoes worth US$200 and make themselves look like basketball players, totally different from who they are. (Quasi-intermediate I, p. 75, my translation)

Wei Duan celebrates the successful defense of her thesis together with her supervisor Dr Li Jia

Where does the ubiquity of English leave Bangladeshi Chinese language learners?

As one of my Bangladeshi friends complained: “My country has been colonized by Britain for over 200 years. I used to think I could escape from English control when I migrated to China, but you see what I’ve learned here? All about America!”

My friend has good reason to point out the Americanized orientation in China as exemplified in the Boya Chinese language textbooks. They construct a world where English and the USA are on top, Chinese and China are subordinate, and other languages and countries simply don’t exist. As such, these Chinese language textbooks surprisingly replicate English monolingual ways of seeing a multilingual world (Piller, 2016).

This erasure not only frustrates and denies international students of non-English backgrounds but also limits the potential of Chinese language learning as bridging China to the world. It is high time that a more inclusive approach should be adopted in Chinese language textbooks targeting international students of diverse backgrounds.

Reference

Piller, I. (2016). Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25-33. doi:10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921 [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/can-chinese-language-learning-reinforce-english-supremacy/feed/ 25 22517 https://languageonthemove.com/gaming-language-learning/ https://languageonthemove.com/gaming-language-learning/#comments Wed, 28 Aug 2019 06:17:01 +0000 https://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21890 For one of my postgraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, I was asked to write an assignment about my language learning history. Recalling all the phases I went through to learn English made me realize that my teachers had not used any educational games and had barely used technology in class. Only a few years on, and such a state of affairs has almost become inconceivable: digital technologies are ubiquitous in today’s classrooms.

So, what has changed? For starters, the learners have changed, and so have we. Digital technologies have spread out vertically and horizontally in all fields of knowledge and fundamentally altered the nature of communication.

Thanks to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) wave, gamification has been widely accepted and applied in schools and universities. The introduction of game-based elements into non-game scenarios, such as classrooms, has helped teachers to motivate learners and boost the engagement of students in real-time during classes (Skøien, 2018).

Figure 1

One popular game-based learning platform – or game-based student response system (GSRS) – is Kahoot!. Kahoot! went from being a research project back in 2006 to being used in classrooms in over 180 countries. According to its developer (Wang, 2015, p.218), like other games, it has the potential to increase the academic achievement, motivation and classroom dynamics among K-12 and tertiary students.

Nevertheless, Kahoot! has not been widely used in second language (L2) learning contexts. Where it is used, the main targets are still motivation and classroom dynamics. To gain a better understanding of the potential of Kahoot! in L2 teaching, I conducted a social semiotic, multimodal analysis, using tools from Systemics Functional Linguistics (Djonov, Knox and Zhao, 2015).

From the point of view of its design, Kahoot! provides L2 students with limited learning opportunities regarding reading and writing skills.

The analysis of the website structure (Figure 1) suggests that there is a dominance of vertical relations in the platform. This means that the website provides the first user (teacher) some freedom to choose among four options (quiz, survey, discussion and jumble), but this freedom in navigation is not transferred to the second users (students). Once a kahoot quiz starts (Kahoot!’s games are called ‘kahoots’), learners have to complete it and do not have the chance to go back and examine their answers before submitting them. It is a game; and you either make it to the first place or not.

In a more detailed examination of two webpages of a kahoot quiz, a question and its alternatives (see Figure 2), it can be seen that the overall layout of them shows a rather static design, which may reflect the institutional values of Kahoot!’s creator(s): the game is teacher-centred. In addition, there is interdependency among the webpages of a kahoot quiz (see green arrow), and even though it seems that their relations are horizontal, the above-mentioned lack of freedom of navigation signals its vertical design. Furthermore, the absence of a writing component when answering questions diminishes the possibilities smartphones can provide.

Figure 2

Kahoot! has proven to be an amazing motivation booster in many classrooms. However, its design favors the completion of the “game” over any reflection of the content and this, in an ESL/EFL context, plays against the opportunities L2 learners need, such as going at their own pace, reviewing their answers, and writing practice. In this context, as elsewhere, “it remains unclear whether Kahoot! leads to greater learning outcomes than traditional methods” (Licorish, Owen, Daniel, & George, 2018, p.5).

New teaching and learning technologies are exploding around us. It is our responsibility as teachers to choose the best among them, not based on their popularity but their effectiveness; modify the way we could possibly use them if needed; and keep in mind that technology is always subsidiary to learners and learning.

References

Djonov, E., Knox, J. S., & Zhao, S. (2015). Interpreting Websites in Educational Contexts: A Social-Semiotic, Multimodal Approach. In International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research (pp. 315-345). Springer, Dordrecht.
Licorish, S., Owen, A., Daniel, H., & George, E. (2018). Students’ perception of Kahoot!’s influence on teaching and learning. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 13(1), 1-23.
Skøien, J. (2018). User Engagement in Game-based Student Response Systems: A Case Study on Kahoot! Retrieved from https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2562794
Wang, A. (2015). The wear out effect of a game-based student response system. Computers & Education, 82(C), 217-227.

My Grade 2 Reader and my primary Song book

When I was a child, I eagerly anticipated the start of each new school year. The first week or two were magical. There were new teachers, new subjects, new routines, and, above all, new books.

In the first week of each new school year, we were issued our textbooks. These belonged to the school but a copy was entrusted to each student for a year. In Year 1 of primary, there was only one such book – a reader. Each year, the number of schoolbooks increased and by the time I was in high school, a dozen or so would be handed out to each student.

Receiving the books involved some trepidation. Each of us hoped that we would get copies that the previous custodian had taken good care of; that there would be no scribbled notes, stains or dog-ears. Of course, the school had a system in place designed to prevent such abuse: each copy contained a little slip where we would have to sign our name and enter it into the list of custodians. Still, being allocated a copy whose previous custodians included A-students or anyone you admired was a good omen.

Once the books had been handed out, we would schlep them home and spend the afternoon covering them neatly in protective paper.

And then the real fun could begin: reading the books. I loved that initial read of the Literature book with its stories and poems; the Geography book exploring far-away places; the History book enabling time travel; the Biology book explaining the natural world; Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Political Science, Religious Studies, Latin, English, French – I browsed all these textbooks with awe and read as much as I could. And with eager anticipation I looked forward to the point in the school year when we would study each lesson in detail and fully unravel the treasures they promised.

Throughout the school year, the books became our regular companions. We would carry them to and from school at least once or twice a week (some, like the Maths book, every day). And we would read them over and over again and use them to prepare for tests and exams.

At the end of the school year, the textbooks had to be returned to the school so that they could be passed on to the next student cohort. By then, the books had yielded all their secrets and new riches could be expected one grade up when school would return after the summer break.

When handing in the books, each copy was closely inspected by the teacher in charge and woe to the student who had not taken good care of their books; or, heaven forbid, lost their copy. Like most students, I was terrified that the inspection might find flaws for which I would be held responsible.

Sometimes, we were the last group of students to use a particular edition and, if that happened, we were allowed to keep them. Even today, I have those copies in my library.

The practices surrounding our textbooks taught us that books are precious and need to be treated with respect. They taught us that we are part of the great chain of human generations and that we are responsible for the legacy we leave to those who come after us. They taught us that books are guides and constant companions that help you grow and mature. And they gave me the gift of a lifelong love for reading and learning.

My experience with my schoolbooks was specific to a particular place and time. What lessons did your schoolbooks teach you? I don’t mean what their content was but what the practices surrounding their use taught you about books, life, and knowledge?

Cover page of the first textbook in the Lift Off series

Although the Saudi government does its best to provide effective English language teaching and learning, there are widespread concerns in the country about the low level of achievement in English among Saudi students. Many researchers have tried to identify the reasons for this situation. My research focusses on the representations of culture and cultural identities in English language textbooks used at different stages in Saudi schools. As textbooks are the main teaching resource in Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms, my research investigates the imagined communities created in these textbooks.

My MRes thesis explored how the two imagined communities of the Saudi source culture and the foreign target culture are created for Saudi students In six textbooks of the Lift Off series that is compulsory in Saudi middle schools.

Findings show nuanced and diverse representations of Saudi characters. By contrast, the representation of foreign characters is overly simplistic and involves heavy gender imbalances. While equal numbers of Saudi men and women are represented, representations of foreign women are relatively rare.

In addition, the findings show a nuanced portrayal of Saudi and Islamic cultures (i.e. the religion of Saudi learners), while representations of Western culture(s) are uniform and reductionist.

Gender segregation is represented as the norm in this Saudi EFL textbook

The compulsory EFL textbooks examined in my MRes research could be described as embracing a Saudi-centric ideological perspective, which creates a strong connection between learning English, Islam and Saudi cultural practices. At the same time, these books only show aspects of Western culture that are acceptable from an Islamic perspective, whereas aspects that are incompatible with Saudi culture and Islam are largely ignored. For example, gender segregation is represented as the norm not only in Saudi culture but also in the target cultures of English language learning.

This misrepresentation and oversimplification may impact Saudi learners and their English learning negatively by depriving them of learning about the culture and communities of the target language. Therefore, my research suggests that the administrators of EFL programs and curricula in Saudi Arabia should pay closer attention to the importance of introducing language textbooks that include rich imagined communities and characters with complex identities from both the source and the target culture to help students understand these communities and attain a high level of linguistic and intercultural competence in English.

Reference

The full text of my MRes thesis entitled “Evaluating the Representations of Identity Options and Cultural Elements in English Language Textbooks used in Saudi Arabia” is available here.

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

The Omidvar brothers on the road: amazing feats of discovery and language learning?

In his most recent round of interviews with the magazine Særzæmin-e Mæn (“My Country”), Issa Omidvar, one of the two adventurous Iranian brothers who undertook a 10-year motorbike journey across the world (1954-1964), shares details of how he and his brother learned English and Spanish, the two languages they needed most for their long journey. Before they left Iran in 1954 they barely knew any foreign languages, so they took some English courses and managed to learn the language in less than three months.

After they set foot on Mexican soil, they learned Spanish, a language they did not know even a single word of. Issa Omidvar claims that, in two weeks, they were both fluent in Spanish and had no difficulty communicating with Mexicans, who went out of their way to welcome them to their country. He goes on to relate that after a month, they were even able to deliver lectures in Spanish for their enthusiastic hosts:

روزی که قدم به مکزیک گذاشتیم زبانشان را نمی دانستیم. اما در عرض پانزده روز توانستیم به زبانشان صحبت کنیم. ما حتی بعد از یک ماه توانستیم به اسپانیایی کنفرانس بدهیم.

[The day we set foot on Mexican soil we didn’t know their language. But within 15 days we could speak their language. We were even able to hold talks in Spanish after a month.]

Issa Omidvar does not share any details about their language learning methods and his account of the brothers’ language learning feats is certainly impressive. But is it really true?

We know for a fact that most language learners take much more than ‘two weeks’ to achieve even a modest level of conversational fluency. Yet, we should not dismiss Issa’s account as an exaggeration. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves as language educators faced with students who usually take years to achieve substantial proficiency, what can we learn from the Omidvar brothers’ account?

The situation described by Issa Omidvar seems to include crucial components of successful language learning: they were young and talented and they had a communicative need:

چون هم جوان و مستعد بودیم و هم واقعا احتیاج داشتیم.

[The reason is that we were both young and talented and we were really in need of the language.]

Reading carefully between the lines, one would be able to establish how imperative their ‘need’ must have been. They made documentaries on the road and held impromptu screenings in universities, halls and arts centers. They needed to know the language of the locals in order to charge an entrance fee and thus finance the next leg of their trip!

Examples of the kind of language learning described by Issa Omidvar can easily be found today. The Fluentin3Months website, for example, whose “language hacking tips” are provided by an alleged polyglot, promotes a more or less similar language learning experience. The first and foremost question that readers have when they arrive on the website is how is it really possible to achieve fluency in three months (or actually much less)? The website features interviews with people who claim to have reached conversational fluency in a language in three months or less, “thanks to a combination of passion for the language, full time immersion, and a general good knack for learning it.”

What this ‘knack’ entails is not usually revealed unless you buy one of their language learning packages. At the same time, one must not lose sight of the fact that this type of language learning, however effective it is claimed to be, is not for those who want to get an A in their language class, nor is it for those who want to learn a language to take an academic test, to write perfectly, to pass a class, or to use grammar appropriately.

If you need a language to use it in academic or professional contexts at any level of complexity, it seems unlikely that there is a way around learning a language the hard way.

In English language teaching ads English seems always fun, easy and accessible to everyone

Taiwanese people’s motivation for learning English is a desire to communicate and a major obstacle to the mastery of spoken English has been the lack of opportunities to speak. As noted in my previous post, the purpose of buxiban is to assist students to pass standardized tests rather than to speak proficiently. Although effective for test-taking, these traditional grammar-translation and teacher-centered methods do not produce fluent speakers. This is a common complaint from teachers and students alike. Students are continually frustrated by the fact that they have been studying English for many years, but can’t carry a basic conversation or communicate with a foreigner.

This realization has popularized teaching methods such as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and English-Only immersion methods. As a result, there is a huge English language teaching market in Taiwan comprised of literally thousands of language schools geared towards teaching English for communication. The methods employed in private language schools emphasize active participation in the learning process and include a variety of teaching aids and materials, handouts, activities, and games to assist learners in increasing their English speaking proficiency. Moreover, the use of native English-speaking teachers and small class sizes are other factors in the success of private language schools. Learners learn to use the language as a tool of communication rather than viewing it as one more subject to be memorized and regurgitated.

Although there is often a notable improvement in a student’s speaking ability there are socio-economic aspects of language learning that render these innovative communicative and English-immersion methodologies problematic, such as the linguistic environment outside the school and the almighty TaiBi (Taiwan Dollar).

In order to illustrate my point, I will use a TV commercial by Jordan Language School. The dynamic commercial presents Jordan Language School as an English language learner’s utopia: Taiwanese students are taught by Caucasian foreigners, multi-media computer programs are utilized, and parents participate with their children in the learning process. The main theme of the commercial is that Jordan’s English Language School uses a scientific teaching method that integrates classroom lessons with multimedia and Internet English teaching. The commercial ends with their slogan, 喬登數位美語，輕鬆快樂無比 ‘Jordan’s Digital American English, absolutely relaxing and fun.’

Slogans such as this one come to define the ideal English language teaching method independent of context.

This commercial promotes English teaching as a practical skill and it suggests that English can be learned easily if the ideal teaching method is used: interactive immersion classroom teaching with an enagaging Caucasian teacher combined with computer technology. After school, children can learn English with their parents at home via online English learning or with language-learning devices such as smartphones.

Commercials such as this one suggest that English teaching and learning is always autonomous and never affected by social, cultural and economic conditions outside the classroom. Nothing could be further from the truth – in Taiwan as elsewhere.

The reality is that disadvantaged children often have limited access to the Internet and cannot afford to study in private language schools.

Private language schools are also privileged as regards method because students tend to be grouped by ability levels in private schools. By contrast, teachers in public schools are usually faced with students of varying levels of English ability. Dealing with a diversity of needs is an elementary school is an English teacher’s greatest challenge in Taiwan.

Methods used in private language schools encourage parents to spend money for additional English study, so their children will not fall behind in their regular elementary school English classes. This creates an injustice whereby wealthy families are able to allocate significant amounts of money to their children’s English education, while poor families are unable to do the same for their children. In other words, it is only wealthy families who can afford to send their children to English language schools and/or send them abroad to immerse themselves in real life communication situations in an English-speaking country. The end result is that English language learning to high levels of proficiency has become the exclusive privilege of the wealthy.

English is often touted as a way to lift poor people out of poverty but the exact opposite is true: English is an important instrument of social stratification in contemporary Taiwanese society (as elsewhere?) where the rich get richer because they can afford to learn the kind of English that opens doors while the poor get poorer because they can’t.

Carrie Chen’s successful chalk-and-talk method

In my previous post, I discussed the celebrity status of star teachers in Taiwan. Although their good looks and personality do play a key role in a star teacher’s popularity, this is only part of the story. These star teachers also possess the knowledge, skills and abilities to teach students in a way that helps them reach their goals. Interestingly, they usually do not employ the much-lauded Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach when they teach nor do they follow the monolingual English-Only Immersion Method. These teachers prefer to use more traditional and local approaches, such as grammar-translation and/or teacher-centered methods. This is due to the fact that the purpose of language teaching in cram schools is different.

In the case of star teachers, they are teaching in buxiban that are focused on assisting students with standardized exam preparation. The star teachers know that more traditional approaches to teaching are the best methods for helping students to pass standardized tests. Clearly, good teaching is context-dependent. It is impossible to separate English teaching methodology from the contexts in which it operates.

I will use the example of a highly successful star teacher, Carrie Chen, to demonstrate how a star teacher teaches their students. Let’s take for example Carrie’s approach to teaching English vocabulary.  Armed with only a blackboard and chalk, Carrie relies on her confidence, enthusiasm and teaching skills to motivate her students.

She begins her class (in the video 05:20) by saying the supposedly longest word in the dictionary, ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.’ She then writes it down quickly on the board to demonstrate her vocabulary expertise. This way she contends that English becomes fun and easy if students study with her saying and they won’t forget the content she teaches them.

Carrie employs a highly traditional and nowadays unconventional method of English teaching, i.e. no teaching aids and teacher centered. She uses Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction and the main focus of teaching is employing techniques (association, cognates, comparison …) to help students memorize English vocabulary. Using a combination of her witty humor, off-color jokes and personal anecdotes to make English vocabulary memorable rather than just being a bunch of syllables and sounds strung together.

For example, she makes fun of foreigners who do not know how to pronounce ‘謝謝 – xie xie (thank you)’ and ‘不謝 – bu xie (you are welcome)” in Mandarin Chinese correctly, instead they might say ‘shit shit (xie xie)’ and ‘bullshit (bu xie)’ to Taiwanese people. An off-color joke she used in the video described above is her strategy to memorize the word ‘phenomenon:’ she explains that ‘phe’ means a female elephant or a fat girl. If a girl is fat, ‘no’ ‘men’ are interested in being ‘on’ her. Hence an easy way to memorize the spelling of ‘phenomeon’ as ‘phe no men on.’

During a speech at a National Taiwan University, Carrie listed some keys to being a successful buxiban English teacher including: a smart and neat appearance, good command of English, and devotion and enthusiasm. She continues by emphasizing the need for encouraging students and remaining positive at all the times and incorporating humor and active learning techniques to motivate and sustain students interest.

The test-oriented method used in buxiban is not exotic or fancy. The secret lies in the way the star teachers conducts the class. The celebrity status of star teachers and their popularity does seem to be skin deep. Without their looks these teachers would not be able to pull in the students into the buxiban. Still, it is interesting to note, that although a lot of their popularity is premised on their good looks and charisma, many of these teachers do in fact know how to teach English very well. If they don’t teach well, their looks will not be enough to keep them their job and star status.

The quality of their teaching methods is reflected in the high scores their students achieve on the standardized tests given for admission into high schools or universities.

The house of the English high school teacher in the village in Sulawesi where Pasassung conducted his fieldwork

In a recent post, I reviewed language policy research that shows how compulsory English in China has given rise to new inequities and is far from being a means to fair development. In that context, compulsory English language learning is problematic for reasons of practical feasibility, allocative effectiveness and distributive justice. That macro language policy perspective is complemented by a school ethnography of English language learning in a small village in Indonesia. The study was conducted by Nicolaus Pasassung in 1999-2000 and has unfortunately never been published but the PhD dissertation it resulted in has now been made available here on Language on the Move.

The thesis titled Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An ethnographic example of a remote Indonesian EFL classroom grapples with the question why compulsory English language teaching in Indonesian high schools has been such a failure. That question in itself was not novel even at the time of the research: the World Bank, for instance, had funded the British Council to explore exactly that question a few years earlier and their answer had been that the English language curriculum and the English language teaching methods in Indonesian high schools were inadequate. The solution was relatively simple: the communicative approach was promoted as the panacea to Indonesia’s English language teaching woes.

However, as the researcher found when he spent almost a year in a remote village on the island of Sulawesi, the curricular and methodological problems in the junior high school he observed were part and parcel of a much larger complex that mitigated against the success of English language instruction; this complex also included the status of English, the cultural values of the school and wider society and the material conditions under which English language teaching took place.

To begin with, English and contexts where it was used were entirely alien to the village and there was no place for English in the community outside the classroom. Even in the classroom, the language had a tenuous hold. For instance, the thesis includes a poignant description of a lesson in which students were studying hotel dialogues from the prescribed textbook. Neither the students nor the teacher had any experience of hotels and a number of misunderstandings unfold as the teacher tries to teach and the students try to study vocabulary items in English that they have no concept of in their native language: in a village that does not have electricity, “vacuum cleaner” is one such example where the researcher as participant observer is called upon by the teacher to explain what a “vacuum cleaner” might be.

This is one tiny example of a sheer endless list of obstacles that the students face: inappropriate materials, teachers’ limited proficiency, corruption, efforts to maintain a harmonious society where everyone keeps face, limited resources on every level etc. etc. all conspire to turn the compulsory English lessons in the junior high school under investigation into a meaningless waste of time. Not only does compulsory English study under these conditions not produce any results but it attracts a cost: the opportunity cost to spend the time invested into English lessons in a more productive way.

Like Guangwei Hu and Lubna Alsagoff in their review of compulsory English in Chinese secondary education, Nicolaus Passasung, too, recommends, inter alia, to make English language learning in Indonesian high schools an elective.

Would such a move further entrench the disparities between rural and urban populations and between the rich and the poor, as the proponents of compulsory English argue? In the world described by Pasassung, English simply doesn’t matter. Existing inequities are largely unaffected by English as securing a good education including learning English in itself is not enough to advance in a world where personal advancement depends on connections and even bribery. As one villager explains, without additional financial and social resources, his sons have little to gain from their education:

Why should I be bothered sending my children to university and spend a lot of money? A lot of graduates are unemployed. When someone finishes university, s/he only wants a white-collar job and would prefer being unemployed to working in a garden. I do not have anyone who can help my children find work in a government office, and I do not have enough money to bribe them. (quoted in Pasassung 2003, p. 145)

Pasassung, Nikolaus (2003). Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An Ethnographic Example of a Remote Indonesian EFL Classroom Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney

Promoting English language learning: billboard for private early English instruction in Wuhan

Knowledge of English has come to be seen as the key talent of the 21^st century, a way to perfect an individual’s character and to modernize societies; a central facet of global development. China, for instance, introduced an ambitious universal English language teaching program in 2001 and English language teaching, including the use of English as a medium of instruction, has since been increasing at an ever faster rate. English has become a gate-keeper at various turns and determines access to good high schools and university entrance (see Zhang Jie’s PhD thesis for a detailed examination of China’s English fever since 2001).

Hu and Alsagoff (2010) explore how China’s compulsory English language learning stands up as a public policy. They identify four key considerations in evaluating language policy: moral justice, practical feasibility, allocative efficiency and distributive justice.

From an idealistic position of moral justice universal English language teaching is a good idea as access to English can be considered a form of instrumental language right: surely, everyone has a right to learn the global power code. However, in the same way that students have a right to learn the global power code, they also have an expressive language right to the full development of their mother tongue and they also have the right to acquire other kinds of useful knowledge. The moral justice argument for English is thus limited to that degree that learning English does not interfere with learning the mother tongue or other subject knowledge.

From a moral justice perspective, the case for English is thus so-so. So, what about practical feasibility? Universal English teaching in China, as elsewhere, is subject to some intractable and incapacitating constraints, which include a severe shortage of qualified teachers, lack of appropriate instructional materials and the non-existence of a sociolinguistic environment in which English is meaningful.

It could be argued that a language policy should not be criticised for implementation problems because these might straighten themselves out over time. On the other hand, they might not; and if policy makers have failed to come up with an implementation plan together with the policy, there is no reason to believe in magical transformation in the future.

The verdict on universal English teaching becomes even more negative when it comes to allocative effectiveness. The costs of teacher training, of hiring expatriate teachers, of developing suitable materials and of creating the necessary infrastructure to teach English are high. At the same time, the available evidence suggests that English language teaching in China, as elsewhere, has, to date not been particularly effective.

Furthermore, addressing the problem of costly and ineffective English language instruction may have made other subjects more costly and less effective, raising the question of distributive justice. Hu and Alsagoff (2010) cite evidence that the promotion of English has benefited only a relatively small number of students in well-resourced urban schools at the expense of the majority of students. Universal English thus benefits an elite group while disadvantaging everyone else:

Because of their privileged position, they [=Chinese elites] are also consuming resources that might otherwise have been allocated to policy options that could benefit the majority, who are not compensated for the losses they suffer as a result of the diversion of these resources. As a consequence, the English medium instruction initiative has not only perpetuated the unequal distribution of power and access but is also creating new forms of inequality. (Hu and Alsagoff 2010, p. 375)

If moral justice, practical feasibility, allocative efficiency and distributive justice are taken into account, the verdict on the universal English learning initiative in China is thus unambiguously negative. Hu and Alsagoff (2010) go on to also assess the English instruction policy not only for the Han majority but also for ethnic minority students and in that context their verdict is even more dire, “an outlandish extravagance” (p. 377).

If universal English instruction is indeed a wrong-headed policy for China’s majority and minorities alike, as the authors conclude, what policy alternatives are there? The authors suggest the provision of English as an enrichment subject rather than as a compulsory subject and the removal of English from high-stakes assessment.

Hu, G., & Alsagoff, L. (2010). A public policy perspective on English medium instruction in China Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 31 (4), 365-382 DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2010.489950

So much hot air: the character for “meeting” consists of the one for “cloud” under a roof

Before my recent visit to Wuhan and Hong Kong I was planning to accept the Esperanto challenge that a number of readers had recently thrown at us and use the upcoming holidays to try and see whether it’s really possible to learn Esperanto in 100 hours. However, in China I got so fascinated by Chinese characters that I’ve now thrown myself into a Chinese character challenge instead.

I’d been intrigued by Chinese for a long time but up until about three weeks ago, I was of the opinion that life was too short to learn Chinese characters. They seemed like a huge set of haphazard lines and occasional efforts by my students to teach me this or that character just reinforced the idea that it was an unsystematic mystery that could only be mastered through years of rote learning at a young age.

Not so! Now I’ve discovered that learning Chinese characters makes the most intriguing pastime I’ve come across in a long time.

In Hong Kong, I picked up Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews’ book Learning Chinese Characters. The book draws on James Heisig’s technique of teaching kanji (and more recently hanzi) through visualisation and thus links each character to a memorable story. I don’t always like the stories and association chains in Learning Chinese Characters but it is a lot of fun to make up my own.

Once you have a visualisation, it’s easy to remember the character. For instance, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the character for meeting会: it consists of the character for cloud云 placed under a roof. Hot air under a roof – it’s the perfect image of many a meeting I’ve attended!

In other cases, it’s easier to remember association chains as in the old party game where players compete to remember the longest chain. The chain one – earth – drop –mouth, for instance, gives you the characters for king, jade and country.

一 one + 土 earth = 王 king

王 king + drop = 玉 jade

玉 jade + 口 mouth = 国 country

So, connecting the meanings of basic characters to memorize the meanings of composite characters is a lot of fun once you get the hang of some basics.

Learning Chinese Characters is a great book to get you started on memorizing the meanings of characters but it doesn’t do much to help you acquire a muscle memory of the stroke order. This is where an iphone application called Chinese Writer published by trainchinese.com comes in handy.

Designed like a tetris game, the player has to trace Chinese characters in the correct stroke order as they rain down on your screen and get them right before they disappear. As addictive as the original tetris game, it feels much more educational and the 47 characters in their first pack already feel automatic to me.

The free version of Chinese Writer comes with a total of 384 characters in four packs. For now, that’s plenty for me but it’s possible to upgrade to the full version with more than 2,000 characters.

Both Learning Chinese Characters and Chinese Writer claim to be starting with the most frequent characters but, unfortunately, there is not much overlap between the two resources in their first 100 characters. I wish the two resources were coordinated because together they offer an incredibly entertaining way to learn Chinese characters.

Language learning meets gaming! For me that’s new territory and I’m blown away by the potential. I haven’t had much time to do a literature search and haven’t discovered much of a concerted research effort. I would love to hear from any of our readers who are into language learning games to find out what the state of the art is.

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.

The textbook wall by Ambreen

Have you ever felt a wall of textbooks around you, obstructing your vision and thinking, rather than widening your horizon? That’s how one of my research participants, let’s call him Basil, described his educational experience to me. He felt that he was positioned as an empty vessel by the writers of these textbook, as if he were a brainless creature. When Basil became a teacher himself, he looked back at all those years and wondered why there had been no sources of knowledge other than the single government-approved textbook for each subject.

In Pakistan, textbook production, dissemination and reception has always been highly regulated and structured. School textbooks erect a regulated and guarded wall, purposefully painted with a single color and single texture to hide diversity under its surface; it is manipulated by an elite which decides which ideas, history, socio-cultural values and norms are being walled in and which ones are being walled out.

As a teacher Basil realized that school textbooks in Pakistan neither nurture inquisitiveness among the learners nor do they enhance the intellectual competence of the learners. Rather, they seem to be produced and taught to manufacture consent and produce unthinking beings. They position learners as blank slates devoid of any consciousness, intentions, individual or collective agency, and they act as instruments for casting learners in an identical form and deprive the learner of formats, texts, images, questions, exercises that trigger thinking and give space to the views, interpretations and responses of learners and teachers. In classroom discursive practices, they do not help teachers engage their learners in developing their own identity and confidence in their individual as well as social consciousness. As a result, pupils largely remain dependent on what is published in textbooks and are largely the passive recipients of views, ideas and interpretations which they take for granted to be accurate.

Basil even argued that much of Pakistan’s woes from suicide bombs to sectarian violence are built in these textbooks which each child is made to learn by heart. While Basil’s views may be controversial, they are not uncommon and have now entered mainstream educational institutions in Pakistan. For instance, the Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKUEB) has recently taken the initiative to diversify educational media in Pakistan. AKUEB was established in 2002 to move beyond the single-textbook approach to teaching and testing.

AKUEB has been the subject of harsh critique and and propaganda. Despite these attacks AKUEB works to promote students learning outcomes (SLO) within the approved curriculum rather than single-textbooks, and promotes the use of alternative educational media in its affiliated schools. Though AKUEB-associated schools were and still are legally bound to use the government approved single-textbook, they have been successful in diminishing the authority of the single textbook by providing multiple sources of knowledge. The introduction of alternative educational media has brought multiple discourses into the classroom. Being exposed to multiple interpretations, views and perspectives, young learners begin to see such media as legitimate sources of knowledge and develop an appreciation of complexities, dichotomies, paradoxes, and diversity.

When I asked another group of my research participants, Grade 8 students, to use a metaphor to describe the subject History, their responses included “history is a sermon,” “history is poison which spreads in the whole body and mind,”  “history is an elephant,” and “history is water in a pond.” I think these metaphors provide evidence that education in Pakistan has moved on since Basil’s time and they can be considered as evidence of the emergence of a critical stance in young learners. These young students are developing the habits of thinking, researching, analyzing and above all questioning and bit by bit the wall is being torn down.